The Erotica Handbook
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Do whatever you want. You’re writing by the seat of your pants. If the story demands it, you must obey! Trust your gut and your sexual desire. Write what you want to see happen because that’s what you’ll write the best. Let your fingers become your voice and type until you can’t take it anymore.
Erotica is about creating a believable and unique experience within the confines of the genre.
Step 7: Story resolution
This is the easiest part and can range from paragraphs to a couple of lines. Just wrap it up. Summarize what’s happened to your character and why she enjoyed it. If you’ve written good erotica then your reader has already orgasmed by this point and doesn’t really care what the wrap up is.
Usually it’s just your character either leaving the scene or the person she just had sex with is leaving. They exchange numbers or whatever, promise to do this again. Doesn’t matter.
This part is only important if you’re planning on writing a sequel. If you are planning on a sequel I recommend you leave the ending extremely open-ended. It might be months before you’ve got a big enough fan base for readers to be requesting sequels, and you don’t want to lock yourself into a story idea you might not be excited about in six months.
For our sample story: The delivery boy leaves, having banged all the frustration out of Molly and set up her furniture. They agree to meet up for coffee after the political rally. Molly feels like a slut for banging someone she just met, but also feels happy and powerful again for taking a risk and having it pay off.
Coming up with hundreds of story ideas
The more you write the more ideas you will come up with. Make sure to always keep a notebook or laptop handy to jot them down. But sometimes you’ll look at the list and think “Everything on that list is stupid. I’m stupid. Everything is stupid!” Don’t worry, this will pass.
I have a secret for generating millions of story ideas for erotica. It’s actually very simple. If you have access to the internet you head over to Twitter.com and take a look at the trending hashtags. These are the topics/ideas/news that people are talking about the most today. Click a hashtag, any hashtag. It doesn’t matter which one.
All we’re looking for is profile photos of people we personally want to have sex with. We’re not going to use these photos, we’re just going to use the person as starting point.
Let’s say you find an attractive fire-fighter from California. Jackpot. Now, who does he want to have sex with? Oh look, there’s an attractive reporter from Channel 3 News who’s covering the forest fire he’s working on. How do we get them in a room together? Figure it out.
Change their names and jazz up their details. Don’t copy their lives or use too much of their likeness in a way that could be traced back to them, because A: They wouldn’t like it, and B: It’s lazy
Using this method I’ve found hundreds of interesting people with unique jobs who I never would have been able to conjure up on my own. Just find a couple good-looking people you would be excited to either have sex with, or watch have sex, and write it up.
You will never run out of material with this method because there are millions of people on Twitter and if somehow you can’t figure out how to use Twitter then open a magazine or a newspaper. Find some interesting people, write them into a situation, and take their clothes off.
Best niches/kinks
Before I tell you my most profitable niches, you should remember that these were just the most profitable niches for me. If you look at the Top 100 erotica list on Amazon you can see what’s popular but keep in mind what’s popular isn’t almost the most profitable. A lot of these stories are 100,000 word romance novels that the author has given up trying to make money on and has abandoned them as 99 cent erotica.
You don’t want to be involved in the 99 cent market. You have to sell six copies of a book at 99 cents to make the same money as one book at $2.99. This is due to Amazon’s royalty structure. They want people writing longer and higher-quality books because it’s better for their users.
Here is the list of my most profitable niches:
Alpha Male. Popularized in 50 Shades of Grey by the “billionaire” subtype. But you don’t have to write about billionaires to be successful in the alpha male niche. Alpha males can be found almost everywhere. Military, cops, criminals, bikers, rock stars, hunters, woodsmen, etc. All that matters is the male is a person of extreme power and can more-or-less do anything they want. Buy anything. Kill anyone. Do anything. Their power can come from wealth, their physical abilities or even their mental abilities. Or make it all three. Superman and Lex Luthor merged into a sex machine.
Older Woman and Younger Man. Sometimes called the MILF (Mother I’d Like to Fuck) niche. This is another niche based on the mechanics of power, except it’s the reverse of the alpha male. The person with all the power is the woman. She’s got what the younger male wants and she can use her body to make him behave as she wants. This niche is about travelling back in time to when to experience youth. Having sex like teenagers. Passionate, messy, frequent.
Multiple Partners. Ranging from an erotic ménage à trois (threesome) to the gangbang. Everybody wants one, few people every experience it. So they read about it and watch pornography about it. If your protagonist is a woman, your story should be about having sex with multiple men. If your protagonist is a man, then he should be having sex with multiple women. But those are just the most common fantasies. This is writing so feel free to do whatever you want.
Gay/Lesbian. While I have zero experience writing male-on-male erotica, I have written quite a bit of lesbian erotica, and I can tell you it’s a huge-seller. The most popular stories are when the age-gap between the two people is large, like 40-year-old and 20-year-old but remember you should be writing the stuff that turns you on, not what you think will turn others on. If you’re a 30-year-old woman and it’s your fantasy to have sex with a 29-year-old female firefighter from Australia, write that.
Paranormal. Also known as “shifter porn.” Paranormal erotica is basically Twilight/True Blood fan-fiction where instead of the climax being character A is turned into a vampire by character B, instead they have sex. Paranormal erotica is very popular because of the alpha male dynamic, which in the case of a werewolf story can be vivid and quite literal. If you want to write paranormal you should be aware that sometimes people get in trouble for writing this, because they make the mistake of having the characters have sex while in animal form. THIS IS CALLED BEASTIALITY AND WILL GET YOU BANNED. So don’t do that. Have them dance around in wolf form all you want, but when they do the horizontal monster mash make sure your characters are in human form.
That’s it. Those five niches represent 70% of the erotica market. Everything else is a specialty kink which can get extremely strange. I’m not judging anybody but I have zero interest in writing a story about old men in diapers pile-driving lactating hookers.
There are some people who are quite successful in the specialty kinks. If they interest you, go for it. Being successful in erotica is about constantly pumping out stories. It’s like going on a diet. Stick to foods you can eat every day and you’ll be fine. If the idea of sitting down and writing is revolting to you then you’re writing in the wrong niche.
Choosing a title
The best titles are ones with keywords in them. This is because titles with keywords in them are more likely to show up in search results and thus more likely to be purchased. If your story is about a virgin then virgin should absolutely be in the title.
Don’t stuff the title with so many words it looks ridiculous. Your title should not be Virgin Alpha Male Sex. Although you can get creative and make something like “Virgin vs Alpha Male,” or “Virgin vs Billionaire.”
Something like that. Think like a customer. They open Amazon, they click the search bar and they start typing what they want to see.
When they see your title in the search results you want them thinking: “This is exactly what I’m looking for.”
The title is a throbbing hint about what’s coming. Catch my drift?
The most profitable word count
Once upon a time Amazon was paying $2 for erotica borrows on books with less than 2,000 words but that’s not the case anymore.
The minimum length for a book is now 2,500 words. Some people get around that by filling their book with lengthy copyright notices and advertisements at the end of their books to inflate the word count. Don’t do this. It’s tempting at first but you’re setting up a business here and if Amazon ever cracks down on those practices then you will lose your account. Why put your passive income at risk for the sake of saving a little bit of time?
These days Amazon is no longer paying per borrow. If you make your book available for Kindle Unlimited customers then you will either get paid per sale or per page read. If somebody in Kindle Unlimited program reads your entire book that means the longer it is the more money you make.
At first my earnings dropped and I was upset, but in the end I realized that this is for the best. The system is best for the customer and without customers our industry is dead.
I have found that the most profitable word count is 7,500. This is based on sales and the time it takes to write. I write 2,500 words per day, so a 7,500 word book takes me three days. Shorter books sell less copies than longer books, but you can write 10 books in the time it takes to write one 75,000 word romance novel. 10 products in the store is better than one product in the store.
Writing shorter stories will also give you a better idea of the market. If you write five Alpha Male stories and five MILF stories and you see that your MILF stories are selling twice as many copies, then you can switch to writing exclusively MILF stories and double your income.
You will have to experiment. Keep track of all your data and come to your own conclusions. The market might shift to 10,000 or 5,000. Only time will tell.
What to do when you’re stuck: Five solid tips to getting past writer’s block
There are two reasons you might get writer’s block.
The stresses of life have overwhelmed you. (I can’t help you with this.)
You aren’t experienced enough at writing.
Experienced writers almost never get writer’s block because their knowledge of the craft is rock-solid. Over the years you will build your own repertoire of tricks on how to get out of a story jam, but I will start you off with my top five.
TRICK #1: Create an interesting thing: Open up a catalogue or a random product category on Amazon and pick something. It doesn’t matter what it is, we’re just going to use it to get your creative juices flowing. Let’s say you see a kitchen table. Write down everything that makes it interesting and insert it into your story. Have your character interact with it. They sit at the table. They eat, drink, smoke at the table. What’s the table made of? Who was the previous owner? Dig deep and you find treasure.
TRICK #2: Blow something up. This is the action-movie trick which is based on a trick by Raymond Carver who said, “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” The reason it’s so effective to blow something up or introduce a dangerous person is because both of these things are interesting and put your main character in peril. They MUST resolve this situation or the story is over. How they resolve it is the most interesting part. It doesn’t have to be an explosion or a man with a gun, it can be as simple as your hero dropping a carton of milk on the ground and having to deal with the mess before something worse happens.
TRICK #3: Hero makes a mistake. This adds a realistic dimension to your character. They follow a lead and the lead was wrong. They came to a conclusion but were incorrect and now must deal with the consequences. You see this all the time in crime/detective stories. The hero thinks he has figured out who the murderer is but when he goes to arrest that person he finds they have a bullet-proof alibi. They now must question their own methods/intelligence and deal with the fact that they aren’t perfect.
TRICK #4: Take a walk. This is for you, not your character. It doesn’t matter where you walk to. Just get away from the keyboard and all distractions. You want your mind to roam and find you the answers to your plot problems. If it’s raining or for whatever reason you can’t get outside then do something boring. Clean the bathroom. Do the dishes. Something mundane that requires almost zero brain power. This frees your mind up to thinking about your story. Trust your brain.
TRICK #5: Meanwhile…at the Fortress of Doom: Ditch your main character for the moment and focus on someone else. Anybody else, it doesn’t matter. What is this other person doing? Why is it important? How does it relate to your main character? If it doesn’t relate, then by golly you make it relate. This trick is effective because whatever you write in this “meanwhile scene” will generate ideas for your main character scene. You don’t even have to use this scene. In our story example the “meanwhile scene” might just be a few quick notes about the delivery boy, what he’s doing, why he’s late etc. Then we if we want to keep the story first person we just cannibalize the relevant details from the “meanwhile scene” and use it in the main scene. The trick to writing is to always be writing. Just keep writing and writing and edit out the garbage.
Writing 2,500 words per day (even when you don’t feel like it!)
I write in 2,500 word blocks. It doesn’t matter how sick or hungover or busy I am, I must write 2,500 words per day. The only exception is if I’m on vacation or I am editing. The days I devote to editing I still try and write at least 500 words. 500 words is nothing, barely a couple paragraphs. You can write 500 words in your sleep.
2,500 words per day is important because we’re shooting for 7,500 word stories. That means every three days we’ll have finished an erotica story that will be making us money every day until we die. Think of it as digging up gold. If there was a gold mine in your backyard that only you could see you’d be down in there every day chipping away.
After 2,500 words my brain turns to mush and I have to eat and recharge my batteries. You might only make it to 2,000 or 1,000 at first. That’s okay. What’s important is that while you’re writing you keep moving forward. Don’t stop to edit the first sentence and don’t let yourself get jammed. Don’t waste time looking up the perfect word in a thesaurus. If you don’t like a word just put some symbols around it like, “He [ran quickly] across the room.” Later during the editing process you can come back and replace [ran quickly] with “bolted.”
The reason you keep moving forward no matter what is because writing a book is like giving birth. You need to push that thing out as fast as possible it or it will die in the womb. Every writer at some point will experience it. It’s like you can see the book in your mind as a tower and one day it just collapses and that’s it. You never end up finishing it.
So the reason we write 2,500 words every day, no matter what, is that after three days it can’t collapse. Even if we hate it or think it will never sell it doesn’t matter because it’s finished. A book that sells one copy is better than the book you never finished that sells zero copies.
Unless your books are absolute garbage, then every erotica story has at least some value and will generate some amount of page reads. This is important because if you write five books then one will get more sales than the other. You look at that book and try and figure out what you did differently. Then you write five more like that. Again, one of them will outsell the rest. You keep repeating this process until you’re rich. It’s that simple.
Keep writing and you will keep making more money. You can’t make less money creating more products. This is practically impossible. The only way you can make less money is if you start cheating and get your account banned. Write honestly and don’t pull any tricks and e
very story you write will increase your passive income.
Watching your sales slowly get higher every day is a great feeling. First you’re shooting for one copy per day, then two, three, four, etc. Just keep trying to break your own records. Keep writing.
2,500 words per day. No exceptions!
Monster mirroring technique
Mirroring is a technique that many authors have found to be successful when writing erotica. There are varying degrees of mirroring, but monster mirroring is even better.
So what’s “mirroring” you ask? It’s simple. Mirroring is when you whip out one of your finished, edited, and published stories, then copy-paste it and change some words. Presto, brand new story! Free money, yeehaw!
“If it sounds too good to be true…”
Here’s the deal with mirroring. If you’re using it to try and pull one over on your customer by tricking them into buying or reading (on Kindle Unlimited) the same story twice, then you are a bad person and Amazon will block your stories and someday disable your account.
Classically, mirroring was used as a way for authors to pump out the maximum number of stories in the minimum amount of time. You can still do this to an extent, but recently Amazon has been dropping the hammer on people who they think might be harming the user experience. So if you’re going to go the lazy route (which I do not advise) then change as much about your story as you can or you will be punished and not in the good way.